Misaligned Co-Production: A Framework for Exploring Academic-Industry Relations

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Abstract

As many authors have noted, contemporary research can be characterized by a number of hybrid relations between researchers based in a variety of different organizations, both within and outside the university. Whilst historians might argue that there is very little new in the existence of academic-industrial inter-connections within scientific research, there is still a tendency – in research publications but also in the statements of policy-makers – to present ‘academic’ and ‘industrial’ research as if they occupied fundamentally different realms. In this paper, we propose and discuss a framework of ‘misaligned co-production’ defined as a process of ‘understanding differences’, i.e. appreciating and holding them open without anticipating strong alignment. While ‘aligned co-production’ is the basis for most accounts of successful collaboration in the STS literature we propose that focusing on moments of ‘misaligned co-production’ gives new insight into how academic and industrial researchers collaborate without smoothing out differences. We explore the advantages of this framework based on case examples of academic-industry collaborations from a field study in a Danish pharmaceutical company.
Original languageEnglish
Publication date2015
Number of pages1
Publication statusPublished - 2015
EventAnnual Meeting Society for Social Studies of Science 2015 - Sheraton Downtown, Denver, United States
Duration: 11 Nov 201514 Nov 2015
Conference number: 40
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/15

Conference

ConferenceAnnual Meeting Society for Social Studies of Science 2015
Number40
LocationSheraton Downtown
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period11/11/201514/11/2015
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